The seize of Damascus through Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the cave in of the regime of Bashar al-Assad closing December despatched shockwaves thru Syria’s political panorama, heralding an exceptional shift in energy. The upward thrust to energy of HTS, previously the Al-Nusra Entrance, is a litmus take a look at for assessing whether or not militant Islamist organisations can evolve thru state-building.
On the center of remodeling Syria will have to be the improvement and safeguarding of girls’s rights. This may end up a revealing lens in which to measure the sincerity of HTS’s professed reforms.
However up to now a stark disparity has emerged between their rhetoric of inclusivity and truth. This seems to contain perpetuating entrenched institutional practices of patriarchal conservatism.
After seizing Damascus, HTS chief Ahmed al-Sharaa took pains to mission a picture of inclusive governance. He claimed: “Syria is a nation of many identities and beliefs, and our duty is to ensure they coexist peacefully within a just system.” He highlighted that 60% of college scholars within the town of Idlib are ladies, and portrayed HTS as a average power that values ladies’s roles in society.
But interviews with senior regime figures in addition to coverage choices and governance practices divulge those statements as hole. As a substitute they counsel a deep-seated dedication to hardline spiritual conservatism.
The brand new management’s legit spokesperson, Obaida Arnaout, mentioned not too long ago that appointing a lady to a task within the ministry of defence would no longer “align with her essence, her biological and psychological nature”. This used to be framed as acknowledging ladies’s suitability for different roles, however it in the long run displays a deeply conservative, patriarchal angle.
Likewise, the appointment of Aisha al-Dibs to steer the place of job for girls’s affairs first of all gave the impression to sign growth. However her first few statements advised a regressive time table.
Blaming civil society organisations for “rising divorce rates”, she vowed that “the constitution will be based on Islamic Sharia”. She added that she would “not allow space for those who disagree with my ideology”.
Al-Dibs’s imaginative and prescient of empowerment seems to be rigidly conservative. It successfully reduces ladies’s roles to circle of relatives, husband and home priorities.
Those two examples spotlight in HTS what seems to be a technique of commandeering state establishments to put in force a radicalised model of Islam, a key trait of political Jihadism.
The brand new HTS-backed justice minister, Shadi al-Waisi epitomises this development. In 2015, as a pass judgement on within the northern town of Idlib – on the time beneath the keep an eye on of the Al-Nusra Entrance – he used to be recorded on video ordering ladies to be achieved for adultery. An HTS consultant has since brushed aside this as “a phase we have surpassed”. However Al-Waisi nonetheless argues that since most of the people in Syria are Muslim, spiritual Sharia legislation will have to take precedence.
So far as ladies’s function within the judiciary is worried, a commentary from Arnaout casts doubt on whether or not they are going to be allowed to proceed to behave as judges, a hard-won proper beneath the Assad regime. In 2017, 30% of judicial posts had been occupied through ladies.
However in an interview with Lebanese TV channel Al-Jadeed in December 2024, Arnaout mentioned: “Certainly, women have the right to learn and be educated in any field, whether in education, law, the judiciary, or other fields, but the job has to suit her nature.” She added: “For a woman to assume a judicial position, this could be examined by experts, and it is too early to talk about it.”
Training coverage has additionally transform a key battleground. The brand new management has presented sweeping reforms. Those come with losing evolution and massive bang idea from science and converting the historical past curriculum to replicate a extra Islamic slant.
Training minister, Nazir Al-Qadri, has downplayed those revisions as “small deletions and corrections”. However the adjustments divulge a planned effort to embed conservative radical Salafi ideology.
Past the school room, HTS’s hardline insurance policies pervade public lifestyles. Girls are segregated on buses, strict get dressed codes are closely propagated. In the meantime constructing new mosques is taking priority over rebuilding war-torn infrastructure.
HTS’s unwillingness to embody authentic pluralism counsel the regime is extra taken with rebranding its ideology than in reforming it.
Paris convention on Syria: delegates known as an ‘inclusive transition’ to democracy.
Saudi Ministry of International Affairs/UPI Credit score: UPI/Alamy Reside Information
Diplomatic guarantees and realities at the floor
Whilst figuring out how one can have interaction with the HTS regime, different nations want to concentrate on this. They will have to act within the wisdom that rhetoric of inclusivity seems – at the moment a minimum of – to be merely that: rhetoric. Company force from global stakeholders such because the United International locations shall be had to hang HTS responsible to a transition to a completely inclusive new machine of presidency.
A convention held in Paris on February 13 and attended through representatives of a huge vary of Arab and Ecu nations underscored the global dedication to this concept. Delegates produced a joint commentary that known as for: “A peaceful, credible, orderly and swift inclusive transition … so that a representative and inclusive governance that represents all components of Syrian society and includes women from the onset can be formed.”
The specific point out of girls and inclusive illustration on this commentary stands in stark distinction to the truth of the transitional procedure. Only a day previous, on February 12, the appointed preparatory committee for the approaching Nationwide Discussion Convention, which is able to thrash out a brand new “political identity” for Syria, printed the restrictions of this dedication.
Whilst the seven-member committee contains two ladies, 5 contributors have sturdy ties to Islamist actions and 3 of the seven are at once related to HTS.
The committee’s composition particularly fails to constitute Syria’s numerous ethnic and spiritual communities, without a Kurdish, Alawite, or Druze representatives. This raises questions concerning the authentic dedication to inclusive governance within the transition procedure.
The contradiction between HTS rhetoric and its movements on range and inclusivity, particularly relating to respecting ladies’s rights, isn’t just a home factor however a important take a look at of its world status.
The brand new regime’s remedy of girls and its enforcement of conservative ideology in violation of criminal and human rights divulge its broader intentions. Failing to deal with those indicators dangers condemning Syria to a repressive long run.
